Re: a question about BTS severities

[Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>]

On 27-Sep-99, 11:33 (CDT), Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> wrote: 
> grave 
>       makes the package in question unuseable or mostly so, or causes data
>       loss, or introduces a security hole allowing access to the accounts of
>       users who use the package. 
>
> I've noticed that in many of the cases where I think the bug has too high
> severity, the bug doesn't affect all users of the package. A specific
> example: I've a rvplayer bug saying that it segfaults, marked important. But
> since people have been using that binary for about 9 months, with general
> success (and since the package in question is only in stable, and has not
> changed in any way in that time period), the bug is clearly not affecting
> everyone, or even many people.

It's clear to you, but perhaps not to the user who submitted it;
for him/her, it "makes the package in question unuseable". You look
at it, realize that it's unique to that user, and send a message to
control@bugs to re-priotize it. What's the big deal?

> I think we should clarify the description of important to note that the bug
> has to affect a large group of people to be important severity. 
> 
> Similarly, I don't think a bug is grave if it makes a package unusable by
> just one person in an odd sitution. On the other hand, I think all security
> and data loss bugs are grave, even if only a few people can trigger them.

I agree with this conceptually, but again, it doesn't seem like that big
a deal to me. 

Steve

-- 
Steve Greenland <vmole@swbell.net>
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